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15 March 2017

Still Fighting, and Dying, in the Forever War

In November 2016, Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer Scott Dayton became the first member of the United States military to die in the continuing conflict in Syria. Chief Dayton was killed by an improvised bomb in the northern part of the country, during a raid against the Islamic State. He was an explosive ordnance disposal technician, a member of the elite bomb squad, as was I, and everyone called him Scotty. He left behind a wife and two children. He was 42 years old.

Forty-two. Scotty served 24 years, most of them at war, and he did it by choice. In the days after his death, I spoke to a number of his friends and fellow E.O.D. technicians to ask why he made that choice, to go back after already completing at least five tours in Iraq and the Persian Gulf. They all gave basically the same answer, and if you are as war-weary as I am, you may be surprised to hear it: Scotty wanted to go to Syria, they told me, to finish the long fight, to do his part until the job was done.

The longest conflict in American history — from Afghanistan to Iraq, to high-value target missions throughout Africa and the Middle East — has resulted in the nation’s first sustained use of the all-volunteer military, wounding and killing more and more service members who resemble Scotty: parents, spouses, career men and women. When compared with casualties of the Vietnam War, the average age of our dead in this conflict, and the proportion who are married, have both risen 20 percent. And that trend is accelerating as the burden of the fight shifts more and more to older, highly trained counterterrorism forces. As The Times reported recently, of the 18 service members lost in combat since 2016, 12 were Special Operations troops like Scotty.

Our country has created a self-selected and battle-hardened cohort of frequent fliers, one that is almost entirely separate from mainstream civilian culture, because service in the Forever War, as many of us call it, isn’t so much about going as returning. According to data provided by the Center for a New American Security, of the 2.7 million veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, half have done multiple tours. More telling, 223,000 have gone at least four times, and 51,000 have done six or more deployments.

“There are some 40-year-old sled dogs that Uncle Sam has been relying on since 9/11,” one of Scotty’s friends said. “They’ll pull and they’ll pull till their hearts explode.”

The Forever War is unlikely to end soon, and for those not in the military, continued voluntary service in this perpetual conflict can be hard to understand. Popular explanations — poor outside job prospects, educational enticements, the brashness of youth — don’t hold up under scrutiny. Unemployment has returned to historic lows, there are many ways to go to college that don’t involve prolonged combat, and take it from me, bluster fades the first time you pick through the carnage from a bomb blast in a playground. No one truly wants to go back to see more of that.

If survival instincts were all-powerful, no one of sound mind would volunteer for military service in wartime. This is the crux of Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel “Catch-22,” set in World War II. The main character, Yossarian, and his fellow bomber pilots count their missions. They are told they can go home after a certain number of bombing runs, but just as the end seems in sight, commanders raise the number. Yossarian experiences a certain bureaucratic horror of being stuck in a system, trapped, knowing he’ll die before reaching the always out-of-reach final run. The only way out is to say you’re crazy. Crazy pilots can’t fly, but, as Heller writes, “Anyone who wants to get out of combat duty isn’t really crazy.” This is the Catch-22. Heller’s point is that self-preservation is not merely sane, but the only sane response to never-ending war. If this logic held sway now, all of America’s soldiers would have left Iraq at the first opportunity and stayed home.

So why did Scotty continue to do one of the most demanding and dangerous jobs in the United States military, in Syria of all places, when he could have retired years ago?

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“He wanted to stay in the fight,” said a current member of his E.O.D. unit who, like all of his active-duty comrades, asked not to be named. “Not to be a daredevil. To lead men. It’s service.”

At its core, explosive ordnance disposal work is about lifesaving, not killing. It is not simply feral id, but rather id ennobled, harnessed in the interest of protecting others. In Iraq and Afghanistan, many explosive devices are meant to harm civilians. Every bomb is defused, no matter the intended target, and in so doing the country is left just a little safer for everyone.

The job shifts a bit, though, when you’re working as part of a Special Operations team, as Scotty was when he was killed. The E.O.D. technician becomes the defender of some of the toughest men produced by our nation’s military. He or she has to do everything the assault force does — rappel from the helicopter, clear the room, snatch the target — but backward. Instead of turning away from the bomb, the technician runs in. “Scotty could admit when he was scared,” said Clay Swansen, a longtime friend, “but he never backed down.” E.O.D. technicians always prefer maximum distance and time when disarming a device, but on a raid, you have neither. The work is often done by hand, in seconds.

“When you do a job like that,” a fellow chief said, “you accept the probabilities. The standard is death. It’s not bravado. That’s kid stuff. It’s functionality and responsibility.”

It is sadly appropriate that an E.O.D. technician should be the first American military casualty of the Syrian war. Since the roadside bomb became synonymous with terrorism, the men and women who disarm those devices, catalog them, exploit their intelligence and track the bomb makers have played a central role in the so-called war on terror. In response, the war has extracted an outsize pound of flesh. There are only a few thousand of us, but Scotty was the 133rd E.O.D. technician killed since Sept. 11.

Friends describe Scotty as funny and humble, but also fiercely protective. “He wanted to be the guy downrange so other people didn’t have to be,” another comrade said. “The most experienced of us don’t feel comfortable sending the junior guys alone into harm’s way.”

Those junior members of the team would be in more danger because they lacked experience. Several members of Scotty’s unit told me that only about two dozen E.O.D. technicians have the qualifications and experience to do their clandestine missions in Syria.

Scotty went back to combat because the volunteer list was short, and he could shield his younger teammates and fulfill his particular duty to Iraq.

“It’s not vengeance,” a fellow E.O.D. chief said, “but we do have unfinished business.”

In our current war, American service men and women have been killed in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, the Philippines, Jordan, Yemen and now Syria, at least. It’s hard to nail down a full list, because our Special Operations forces work in obscure places with minimal public knowledge. The wars have been going on so long that we Americans have had time to cheer, and then protest, and then cheer again when we thought they might end, and then forget when they didn’t.

Meanwhile, our country has trained the men and women of the military to never give up. For many of those who served, then chose to go back for another tour, and another, and another, there is meaning to be found in living up to that standard.